


If I Had a Functional Pancreas I Could Love You

by Castillon02



Series: Chronic Condition [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: 00Q Summer, Diabetes, Fluff, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Q mentions blowjobs, Secrets, like G-rated is how mild they are, super-mild D/s implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 06:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1888431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q fears that revealing his diabetes will make Bond think less of him. Bond surprises him. (Fluffy just-established relationship fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Had a Functional Pancreas I Could Love You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dhampir72](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dhampir72/gifts).



“Bond!” Q didn’t slam the door of his office shut behind him, but he couldn’t contain the sharpness of his voice or the length of his stride. Eighteen months ago, he wouldn’t have allowed himself the luxury, but now he stopped in front of Bond and said, “I need you to stop me from doing something stupid. Physically stop me.” 

Bond looked at him. He was sitting at his customary place on the orange wool sofa behind Q’s desk with a book in his lap and his suit jacket draped over the back of Q’s desk chair. He set the paperback he’d been reading on top of the side table. 

Q barely had time to register that Bond had stood up. A dizzy moment later, he was lying belly-down on the sofa cushions with Bond’s heavy, comforting weight sitting beneath his shoulder blades and his hands resting on his upper arms. “You didn’t have to do it like that,” he mumbled, even as he felt his muscles begin to relax beneath Bond’s warmth. 

“I didn’t have to,” Bond said, “but you like that I did.” He sounded smug. 

“Arse,” Q said, and he really should have expected it when Bond wriggled his muscular glutes against his back. “Immature arse,” he corrected himself. He buried his face in the sofa cushion in the futile hope that Bond wouldn’t see him smile. 

“Why am I sitting on you, then, if I’m such an immature arse?” Bond asked.

'Because I’m taking what I can get,' Q thought. 'Because you can sit on me and fuck my face without thinking I’m weak, but I don’t know if you’d respect me if you knew someone could shuffle me off with a bag of sugar.' He cut off that line of thinking before it could take a firm hold. He’d been down that thought-spiral too many times. “Because M is being a bastard,” he told Bond. 

Bond began to card his fingers through Q’s hair. “But he’s usually so nice,” he said dryly, and then asked, “What’s he done now?” 

Q sighed and felt any remaining tension fade away beneath the pleasurable tingle of Bond’s fingers threading through his hair and scratching gently over his scalp. The hair thing was something Q had gone out of his way to encourage as their relationship had become more tactile. He didn’t let Bond touch him much, not wanting to set a precedent that would lead to Bond’s discovery of the insulin pump on his abdomen, but hair was okay. Hair, hands, shoulders—and his back too, since they had discovered ten weeks ago, after four sleepless nights and an Incident, that Q calmed down when he had 78 kilos of death-defying assassin sitting on him. They hadn’t had a reason to see if that were always true until now. 

He melted into the sofa with a contented sigh. It definitely was. 

“Bastardry?” Bond reminded him, and he tugged a little harder at a lock of Q’s hair. 

It felt like an electric jolt down his spine. Q made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and nearly tried to buck Bond off. “Don’t do that,” he said, turning his head to the side so he could talk. “You’re such a twat. You know I’m sensitive.” 

Bond made an amused noise above him. “It kept you from falling asleep,” he said. He rested his hands on top of Q’s head, apparently content to keep them there, totally still for the rest of infinity, or at least until Q started talking. 

Q huffed. “This is stupid and childish, I’m warning you right now,” he said. 

Bond’s fingers started stroking through his hair again. 

“First of all,” Q said, “I put in for time off next month and M has since informed me that the soonest they can spare me for longer than three or four days will be January.” 

It was currently August. 

“Not a bad reason to be upset,” Bond said, an edge in his voice. He’d had to push hard for Q to take even half of his paid leave last year. 

“That’s not the childish part,” Q told him. “The rest of it has to do with the T.S.S. conference. You’re probably familiar with it; it’s been going on for almost twenty years now.” 

“I’ve never been,” Bond said in a tone that strongly implied 'I’ve always managed to get out of it.' He considered escort duties a punishment. He continued, “003 told us about the time he went with Doctor Sharma six years ago. Biggest gathering of espionage geeks and their bodyguards on this side of the Atlantic, lots of science and showing off?” Sharma was Q’s second-in-command and more experienced administrative half.

“That’s right,” Q said. “A few big names will be there, plus a lot of bright up-and-comers. It’s an opportunity to exchange ideas, make connections, get a look at what other organizations are working on, and generally have face-to-face conversations with intelligent people who I am, crucially, not in charge of.” 

“But?” Bond asked. 

“The Quartermaster can’t go,” Q said. His hands clenched into fists next to Bond’s legs for a moment before he forced them open again. “It’s a reasonable precaution and I’m aware that I shouldn’t pout, so don’t even start. It’s just...” 

“You’re disappointed,” Bond said. His hands slipped through Q’s hair and down to his shoulders where he gave them a comforting squeeze. 

“Yes,” Q admitted, and he was glad to be facing the back of the sofa so he didn’t have to watch Bond watch him. “And stupidly angry with it, even though this wasn’t unexpected and I love my job, and I wouldn’t give up being Quartermaster for anything. It’s just… I was slated to go, you know. Two years ago. I’ve been wanting to ever since I joined up and heard about it. But the last con was right in the middle of—well. The old Q had just died, and then M did, and going to fun conferences wasn’t exactly the thing to think about when we were scrambling in the tunnels like rats trying to keep our operations stable. Obviously.” 

“And now that things have settled down, you’re feeling the effects of early promotion?” Bond asked. “Poor young thing,” he said with dollops of fake sympathy, “expected to handle so much responsibility.” 

Q hit Bond in the leg, which was the only place he could reach with his arms behind him and Bond straddling his back. “It’s not the responsibility, as you well know, you Paleolithic relic.” 

Bond patted Q’s arm as if to stave off further violence—or possibly as a reward for it—and went back to petting his hair. “What is it, then?” he asked, even though he was a master interrogator and had probably figured out the answer about thirty seconds into the conversation. That was one of the things Q liked about him: he was always collecting more data. 

“Mmm… Obviously I was the right choice for the job,” Q said, “and taking a leadership role has been fulfilling both professionally and personally. However, I have much less time for creative work now, and being in charge twenty-four-seven can be a bit tiring sometimes.”

“Hence me sitting on you,” Bond pointed out. 

“Probably,” Q admitted, feeling the tips of his ears heat up. “You can continue that line of inquiry and hit a red light at every intersection on the way home, by the way.” 

“Nothing wrong with a little sitting-on,” Bond informed him placidly. Somehow the lack of overt lasciviousness only managed to make the remark even lewder. 

“Every day,” Q said, “I’m grateful that I don’t have to go out in public with you.” 

“As if I would be seen next to you,” Bond said. He snorted and plucked at the neck of the cardigan Q was wearing. “The fact that this is designer only makes it worse.” 

Q smacked him on the leg again by way of replying. They had had this conversation a thousand times before, ever since Bond had discovered how comfortable Q’s sofa was and started invading his office; it was the verbal equivalent of Bond’s hand moving up and down in an easy rhythm over his hair. 

After a while of easy, half-lidded quiet, Q said, “I think I’m a hundred percent less likely to do something petty to M’s personal email now. Well done. Do you want a blowjob later?” 

“What I want,” Bond said, “is to make you come until your brain shuts up and your muscles stop working.” He punctuated the sentence with a long, scraping drag of his fingernails down the back of Q’s sensitive neck. 

Q gasped and his body tried to curl in on itself, but all he really managed beneath Bond’s weight was to flex his legs and arch his neck as though he wanted Bond to do it again. Which, if he was honest with himself, he did. All the same, he said, “That’s not a good idea. I told you.” 

(Well—after sucking Bond off against a wall last month, bringing two years of friendship to a fantastic climax, he had backed away from the hands trying to tug him into a kiss, mumbled a polite thanks-but-no-thanks, gone back to his desk, and ignored Bond’s incredulous eyebrows until they descended back to their normal position. The only reason similar scenes hadn’t occurred during the following weeks was because Bond had, up until now, been willing to take a hint.) 

“Remind me again what your reasons are,” Bond said, remembering the same scene if the dryness of his voice was anything to go by. 

For a moment, all Q could think about were the plastic sounds his insulin pump would make if he gave Bond free rein to explore—if Bond accidentally dragged a hand over the slender white oval of it, bumped into it with his nose, or perhaps knocked it against his belly while they were trying to frot. Bond would say, “What’s this?” and Q would reply, “Oh, just the device that keeps me from dying. It’s not a big deal.” 

And it wasn’t a big deal, not really; Q had been living with type one diabetes since he was twelve and hadn’t had an A1C above seven percent in five years. 

People didn’t care about how in control he was. They just looked at him differently when they found out. They said things like, “Are you sure you can eat that?” or “Can you handle a shift this long?” or “Guess you’re paying for all that Haribo you ate as a kid, right?” Even if he managed to take the insulin pump off without Bond noticing, the tiny injection site scars on his belly and upper thighs were very distinctive. 

Bond had been the first 00 to respect him and he hadn’t turned into a berk after Q had got on his knees for him. The last thing Q wanted was for him to start thinking he needed babying or couldn’t keep up with the demands of the job. 

“Is it moles?” Bond asked, poking him between his shoulder blades. “Body-consciousness? STDs? You should know that you could have tentacles under there and I would start training myself into xenophilia.” 

“‘Start,’ that’s a good one,” Q said.

Bond paused. “So it is tentacles, that’s what you’re telling me,’’ he said. 

“You’re ridiculous.” Q rolled his eyes. 

Bond took one of Q’s wrists with his fingers and pressed a stubbly kiss to the back of his hand. “That wasn’t a ‘no,’” he said, smirking against his skin. 

Q growled at him. 

Bond leaned down and growled back, deeper, right next to his ear. He scraped his teeth along the same path his nails had taken down his neck only a minute ago. 

An embarrassing noise came out of Q’s mouth. “Stop, stop, stop,” he said, and he had to shift his hips in a way that was far too revealing. 

Bond immediately sat back and took more of his own weight, allowing Q to squirm into a less uncomfortable position. “All right?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Q said, on the tail end of a hard inhale. “Just please don’t do that right now.” He groped for Bond’s legs and tugged at them to signal that he could sit fully again.

Bond resettled himself, his weight a steady anchor that pulled the buzz in Q’s brain back to calmness. He was quiet for a little while and Q almost thought he’d decided on a temporary retreat. Then he asked, tentatively: “Is it a psychological thing?” 

Q buried his face in the sofa in lieu of a proper headdesk. The groan he let out was not sexy. 

Bond sighed, but he still pressed a kiss to the top of Q’s head. “I think it’s important to talk about this,” he said. “But if you tell me to drop it, I’ll drop it.” 

Q craned his neck to stare at him. Quite apart from the anomaly of him wanting to talk, Bond had enormous trust issues, and as a 00, some of his mildest interrogations had continued through far more than unsexy moans. 

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t drive me crazy,” Bond said, looking pained. “But manipulating it out of you would probably be a poor basis for long-term communication.” 

That only made things worse. Bond was willing to drive himself mad and thinking about their relationship in the long-term, and Q was holding them back from fantastic sex because he didn’t trust Bond not to freak out about his lifelong illness. 

“Fuck. Me,” he said, pushing his face into the sofa again. “Not literally!” he added, diving back up when Bond slipped two fingers beneath his trousers and snapped the waistband of his pants against his hip. “Arse.” 

“Hip,” Bond corrected him, and then he poked at it. 

“That’s horrible. You’re horrible. I’ll think about it,” Q said, and he didn’t smile only because Bond’s puns didn’t need any positive reinforcement. 

***

M assigned Bond a mission the next day: eliminate yet another terrorist-linked weapons dealer with more ambition than sense and secure the nuclear weapons he’d managed to get his hands on. Q called Bond to his office and equipped him with his Walther and radio, a Geiger-counting watch, a waterproof information pamphlet that he had mocked up (with “How to Disable A Nuclear Bomb--For Dummies!” in Comic Sans on the inside of the professional-looking cover), and a video link to Q Branch so he wouldn’t have to use the pamphlet. 

They didn’t kiss goodbye, partly because they were in a professional setting, but mostly because Q hadn’t let Bond kiss him yet. In his experience, kissing often involved things like lapel-grabbing and smooshing each other’s abdomens together, things that would make the hard line of the pump beneath his clothes rather noticeable. 

“Bring that pamphlet back,” he told Bond instead, joking. “It was very expensive and took hours of work.”

Bond rolled his eyes to the heavens, took Q’s hand, and brought it to his mouth for a kiss before returning it to Q’s side. The whole thing took less than two seconds. “I’ll do my best,” he said. 

It occurred to Q as he watched Bond leave that if Bond could avoid being an A-class arsehole about Q’s paranoid and seemingly senseless avoidance of physical intimacy, then he probably wouldn’t mind knowing about the dietary management and BG checks that had been going on for years without him noticing. Maybe—possibly—his unfavorable estimation of Bond’s reaction had been based on data compiled from other people rather than on Bond’s own behavior in the past two years. 

It was an odd sensation, rooting against his own conclusions.

***

Q thrust a manila folder with a printed out copy of his medical records in Bond’s direction without looking up from his preemptive attempt to bury himself in code in case this all went terribly, horribly wrong. He already knew how Bond’s mission had gone; he’d been listening for most of it. 

Bond took the folder. “I have a file too,” he said. He raised a closed fist in front of Q’s face and opened it to reveal a USB. 

Q blinked and picked it up. “From M?” he asked. Bond’s meeting with M had run twenty minutes longer than his immediate after-action reports usually did—not that Q had been aware of every second that had passed since Bond had got off the plane at Heathrow at 18:25 that evening or anything. 

“Partly from M, mostly from me,” Bond told him, flipping the folder open without sitting down. He had showered, shaved, and changed into a spare suit before his meeting, and his ramrod straight posture gave nothing away. Only the dark circles under his eyes and the purpling bruise over his left temple hinted at the violence he’d faced on his last mission. Weapons dealers could be dangerous by themselves; this one had also been courting a few governments who hadn’t reacted well to their prospective merchandise being threatened. 

Bond’s stiff posture and immaculate dress had Q on edge as he plugged the USB into a tablet. Ever since the night Q had tricked him into falling asleep on his sofa instead of attempting to drive home with a concussion, he had grown used to Bond draping his jackets (and later his ties, and occasionally—after hours—his trousers) over various surfaces in Q’s office. If the files were a gift as Bond had implied, then they seemed to be one Bond was uncertain about. 

He skimmed through the documents on the drive, opened his mouth, and glanced at Bond’s unreadable face as he perused the folder Q had given him. Then he read through the documents again, slower, and once more—slower still—until he could be sure that he wouldn’t do something stupid. Something like launching himself at Bond while Bond was potentially experiencing post-mission stress and getting his arm wrenched instead of a snog.

The entrance papers for the T.S.S. convention were fantastic enough on their own, but two weeks of leave on less than a month’s notice? Either M had been persuaded to make a benevolent change of heart or Bond now owed M a large favor. Whichever it was, Bond had apparently spent at least twenty minutes negotiating with their boss on Q’s behalf. In the normal course of events, Q might have been a little miffed about this—he could negotiate on his own behalf, thank you very much. But this… 

There was no reason for it. He hadn’t made Bond a special gadget, or hacked anything for him, or helped him out of more trouble than usual. None of those would justify this amount of effort anyway. It must simply be that Bond—well—

That Bond liked him quite a lot. 

He could only hope that Bond’s own reading material hadn’t changed anything. Q’s hopes and calculations aside, romance with a diabetic person might not be what Bond wanted. 

Bond set the medical folder on Q’s desk. 

Q’s lungs tightened as he waited for Bond to ask something—how long he could live without insulin in an emergency, maybe, or what he could safely eat. People often obsessed over his diet when they found out; they seemed astonished that he could eat things like cake. 

Instead, Bond’s mouth quirked up at the corner and he deadpanned, “You dislocated your right arm when you were eight. I don’t know if I can be with someone who has that much inborn recklessness.” 

“I was doing science so fuck off,” Q replied on automatic. He gaped for a moment as he processed the implications of Bond’s words, and then he said, “I’m going to kiss you now. Don’t hurt me.” 

“I’ll try to contain myself,” Bond said. The craggy lines of his face were creased in a smile. 

Q was smiling too—so hard that his face hurt and he probably looked like a loon. He crossed the few steps between them and clutched at Bond’s shoulders, just looking at him. Despite his words, he couldn’t make himself move nearer. 

After a few moments, Bond raised his eyebrows and said, “I know you’re young and inexperienced, but kissing tends to involve mouths.” 

The banter moved him forward where romantic gestures hadn’t. “Hmm, mouths, let me see,” Q said. He leaned forward, nipped beneath Bond’s jaw, and dragged his teeth down to just above Bond’s collar where he delivered a sucking, vengeful, obvious bite and listened with pleasure to Bond’s sharp inhale. “Was that a kiss then?” he asked, looking back up and feigning innocence as he met Bond’s heated stare. “It did meet your criterion.” 

“You’re horrible,” Bond told him, as one of his warm hands curled around Q’s waist while the other groped his arse, and they both pulled Q as close to Bond’s body as it was possible to get while still wearing clothes. The bump of Q’s insulin pump against Bond’s abs didn’t even make Bond twitch as they kissed.

**Author's Note:**

> Dhampir72, I hope this is to your liking! 
> 
> Thanks very much to grigorisgadreel (http://grigorisgadreel.tumblr.com/) for the quick and thorough beta; this story would have many fewer commas and more embarrassing typos without her input! Any remaining mistakes are all mine. 
> 
> Concrit would be lovely. I'm always looking to improve. <3 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
